A Tampa-based food bank feeds hundreds of thousands while D.C. debates drastic cuts in food stamps.
by Mitch PerryAs the humidity began to thicken this past Monday morning, the line began to form at the Trinity Café in the V.M. Ybor section of Tampa.
Among those waiting was Paul Loud, who led a relatively stable life in Lakeland until recently. Now divorced and on disability, he’s learning that the $700 he gets each month from the government doesn’t really go too far, not when nearly half of it goes to his monthly rent at the Salvation Army on Florida Avenue.
So free meals at Trinity are critical for Loud, who frequents the facility at least twice a week.
On the same morning, many hundreds of miles north of Trinity, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Senate was voting on the Farm Bill. Depending on the outcome of debate with the House, the legislation could lead to huge cuts in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — the debit cards still referred to as food stamps.
Without those benefits, millions more people may find themselves depending on the resources of organizations like Feeding America Tampa Bay, which provides food to Trinity and more than 600 other charities in West Central Florida.
Here are two perspectives from two different worlds on the challenges of hunger in America.
Feeding America Tampa Bay is the region’s premier food bank. Located in a warehouse in East Tampa, the bank feeds 700,000 people in 10 counties annually from Citrus to Polk to Manatee. It’s one of 202 U.S. branches of Feeding America, which until a name change in 2008 was known as America’s Second Harvest.
Tampa Bay CEO Thomas Mantz came on board last October after running a similar organization in Jacksonville. “Our goal at Feeding America Tampa Bay is to try and recover all available food and move it into the community where it can help families as opposed to being wasted,” he says, referring to the fact that an estimated 10 billion pounds of food is thrown away in the U.S. every year.
The massive warehouse and main headquarters are based a block south of Seventh Avenue on 50th Street, but Feeding America Tampa Bay also runs six other distribution areas in the region. The organization has begun employing mobile pantries to distribute food to pre-selected individuals and families, and works on a number of childhood hunger initiatives. There’s also a robust volunteer program, with over 20,000 people donating hours to the cause in 2012.
The Tampa bank depends on three main food sources: corporate donations from companies like Tropicana and Nabisco; grocery stores (though the news this winter that the Sweetbay Supermarket chain would close 22 stores in the Tampa Bay area definitely hurt, representing more than 20 percent of the 400 stores they were receiving food from); and farmers, who sell surplus for as little as 2.5 to 12 cents a pound via the Florida Association of Food Banks. Another source (one that is currently covered by the Farm Bill) is The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which funds purchase of surplus commodities to stabilize weak agricultural markets; Feeding America Tampa Bay is the local repository for those supplies.
Zach McGee of the Association of Food Banks says that farmers typically sell off foods when market conditions have affected a product after it’s been picked, packed and refrigerated. Situations also arise like the recent warmer-than-usual winter, when some crops came in much earlier than expected, and it would have cost the growers more to store produce in their coolers than to sell it to the Association, which in recent years has received appropriations through the Agriculture Department ($700,000 this fiscal year).
McGee says the best thing about the program is that it enables farmers to do good. “They love to donate, they love to help out, they’re good, salt-of-the-earth people. But they can’t go broke doing that.”
Agencies both big and small depend on Feeding America Tampa Bay, which charges them a handling fee of 18 cents a pound.
“We purchase as much as we can from them,” says Cindy Davis, program director of Trinity Café, which boasts of serving free three-course restaurant-quality meals to over 200 people a day. “Unfortunately for us, they don’t have as much protein in the quantities that we need, but we get a lot of canned goods.”
Trinity is hampered by not having a vehicle that could visit the East Tampa facility on a daily basis to buy fresh foods, but Davis may try to look for a grant for one in the future.
Officials at the St. Pete Free Clinic picked up over 209,000 pounds of donated food from Feeding America Tampa Bay over the last year. The clinic used to have a policy against paying for food, says its director of food bank operations, Ken Murphy, but it has begun doing so on some items over the past year. [page]
One of the bank’s biggest customers is Metropolitan Ministries, which serves 2,300 meals a day at its Florida Avenue facility. MM makes three trips to the food bank each week.
“They get great bread,” says Cliff Barsi, senior director of food service and social enterprises with the agency. He’s a fan of their desserts as well.
Barsi says he appreciates the online system that allows him to order directly what he needs.
Although homelessness continues to be a vexing issue in the Tampa Bay area, there is no dearth of soup kitchens and facilities for the hungry. Feeding America Tampa Bay is dedicated to stocking those kitchens so that people like Paul Loud will always be able to get a meal.
The Farm Bill used to be a no-brainer, a something-for-everyone piece of legislation passed by Congress every five years since it was first introduced in the 1930s.
But in 2013, like so much else in Washington these days, the bill is mired in partisan intransigence.
Last year, serious differences arose over the bill between the House and Senate, forcing Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to hammer out a nine-month extension during 11th-hour fiscal cliff negotiations on New Year’s Eve.
On Monday, the Senate passed its version. But even though the extension ends in October, ostensibly forcing Congress to come to terms by the end of summer, House vs. Senate wrangling may lead to dèja vu all over again. One of the big sticking points: how much to cut from the food stamp program.
As the Washington Post wrote in a recent editorial, this is the way the Farm Bill usually works: The city folks get food stamps to help the urban poor (and the grocery store chains where they shop), while the rural community gets subsidies for commodity producers, as well as the boost in demand from food stamps.
But that’s not what’s happening this time around.
The Senate’s vote represents major reform in farm aid, eliminating $5 billion in direct payments to farmers and farmland owners who traditionally have been paid whether they grow crops or not.
And the House Agriculture Committee’s version of the legislation, which it passed last month, calls for a reduction of $21 billion to SNAP over the next decade, cutting out assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people.
The entire House will take up the bill next week. Its companion bill in the Democratically-controlled Senate would also cut SNAP, though by a much less draconian amount ($400 million out of almost $80 billion spent annually on food stamps).
Over two-thirds of the Farm Bill funds the Nutrition Title, the largest source of funding for federal nutrition assistance programs like SNAP. The maximum monthly allotment is $200 for an individual and $668 for a family of four, which averages out to around $2 a meal.
The number of Americans using SNAP benefits has experienced a huge bump since the beginning of the Great Recession, though conservative critics would rather blame the increase on the ascension of Barack Obama to the White House.
According to the Department of Agriculture, a record 47 million people were on food stamps at the end of last year, with 3,353,064 in Florida. That’s a 70 percent increase since 2008. Under the Supplementary Poverty Measure, the Census Bureau estimates that nearly one in six people in the country are now living in poverty.
Although Newt Gingrich labeled President Obama the “food stamp president” last year, the federal government began aggressively encouraging people to go on food stamps during the George W. Bush administration. CNNMoney reports that a recruitment campaign began during Bush’s tenure, pushing participation up 63 percent during his eight years in office. The USDA began airing paid radio spots in 2004. Last year the USDA began running similar ads, targeting the elderly, the working poor, the unemployed and Latinos.
Tampa area Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor said on Monday that “this Tea Party contingent in the House just goes too far in attacking supplemental nutrition for children and families, and if they prevail, we won’t have a farm bill.” But she says she’s optimistic that the Senate bill will carry the day. “I’m not sure they can even get a bill past the House of Representatives.”
One thing is certain. If the House version does pass, the implications are dire, not just for the low-income families who would be immediately affected, but for the businesses that depend on them.
The CEO of Feeding America Tampa Bay puts its this way:
“SNAP enables a family to shop at a local store,” says Thomas Mantz. “If the SNAP portion of the Farm Bill is cut, families will have to return to seeking food assistance at food banks and other agencies who are already overwhelmed with folks in need. Simply, there is not enough food to reach all who have need for it currently.
[page]“If SNAP is cut, more will go hungry.”